More Kinect Stuff

Here’s a video I made yesterday:

There’s a few things I want to explain about the video. So here goes.

Feet Positions

As you can see the feet are regularly off the floor. I did originally start coding something to make the feet fall to the floor – so you’d always be on it.. but I decided that you don’t actually always want it to be on the floor.

So in my opinion the best thing to do was to make it so that the user can pick the sensor up and move the ragdoll wherever they want. That way I don’t have to force this crappy code on users – and they can tweak it all they want.

Ragdoll Movement

On Thursday/Friday I changed the way we move the ragdoll. Previously I was setting the physics object positions directly – just teleporting them in to place. This worked but it has issues when interacting with other objects. Your hand would go through them instead of pushing them.

I changed it to use a motion controller – which instead of setting the object’s position – applies the correct forces to move it into the chosen position. This is the same thing that is used to move objects with the physgun, or the gravity gun.

The result is much neater realistic interactions with the world – as you can see in the video above.

The motion controller stuff is something that really should be exposed to Lua coders – so I will try to find a way to expose that this week.

Recording/Playback

This is something I want to get in, and I’m contemplating the details at the moment (record & save clientside, share on workshop, allow playback for people without kinect, etc).

If you’re really itching to record what you’re doing you can record your input using Kinect Studio – which is included in the SDK.

It’s Not Out Yet

I keep getting tweets asking why it doesn’t work for people. It’s probably because it isn’t out yet. It’s on the SVN but that’s a developer thing – it’s not meant for people that don’t know what they’re doing. I’m aiming to release it on Thursday (the 6th).